Clare Sudbery left the IT industry years ago because she was bored and unmotivated. Fast forward, and now she’s back at it, this time as a passionate lead consultant developer at ThoughtWorks. Why the change?

In her time away, Sudbery learned something during her stint teaching math: much like people divide themselves and others into good or bad at math, she says the IT industry is doing the same to employees and new hires. They’ll say, “Can you believe that so-and-so didn’t know anything about X?” Considering the complexity in the world, Sudbery says, “Yes, I can believe it.”

That's why she champions curiosity and learning today, and leads by example by showing it’s okay to ask questions when she doesn’t know the answer.

“When you meet people who don’t know things that you do know, don’t judge them about it, don’t laugh at them; get excited because that means you get to teach them the thing and you both win.”

Listen to this honest and thought-provoking conversation recorded at Agile 2018 in San Diego with host, Chris Murman.

Alex Miller is the General Manager for Stack Overflow, a website which has solved more than 10 billion problems for software developers over the last decade. Miller believes it is critical for IT leaders to empower developers to solve technical problems at the source, because they tend to have the best idea of how to solve it.

From the shift in types of questions that Stack Overflow answers, Miller can see that the role of software developers is changing, which reflects the need for IT leaders to also evolve.

“What we see in the data is a reflection of what we see in the industry: The entire concept of what it means to be a software developer is changing.”

Sam Guckenheimer is the author of “Software Engineering with Visual Studio” and the Product Owner of Microsoft Visual Studio Cloud Services. He paints a picture of how much Microsoft has changed in the last 15 years or more: where once patent processing was seen as a critical skill for junior engineers, now open source, Agile and DevOps are the foundational to the company culture. Guckenheimer points out that "now Microsoft is the largest contributor to open source on Github," with Google coming in second.

We were excited to sit down with Gene Kim, CTO of IT Revolution and co-author of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook, and most recently Accelerate. We got to ask Kim some juicy questions including:

What role do you play in the DevOps ecosystem?

If you could go back in time and do it all over again, what would you do differently and why?

Candace Kelley is the Director of Enterprise Agile Transformation at AT&T. She has been influencing the adoption of SAFe and Agile practices at AT&T for the last 5 years. Kelley shares her path to becoming an Agile leader within her organization and the keys to scaling Agile.

One of the key factors that has allowed the adoption of Agile at scale has been leadership engagement in the process. When embarking on a new program or portfolio, Kelley brings in the executives for a full day immersion.

“The reality is when you start a conversation with ‘We can deliver products and services faster, cheaper and at a higher quality, are you interested?’ they’re going to say yes. They are willing to come in. They’re setting the example to their team, they’re showing it’s important.”

Adam Mattis hosts at SAFe Summit 2018 in Washington, D.C.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Danielle Crop is the VP of Application Experience and Platforms at American Express. She shares her journey helping the 168-year-old financial services giant transition into an Agile organization.

Amex is fundamentally a digital company – they’ve never had brick-and-mortar branches – and have always been customer-centric. Today the challenge they face are the new ways of working within the organization. Some teams, such as marketing, that have traditionally used project management within their own silo, now have visibility into and are dependent on product teams to drive value.

Learn how Amex approaches scaling agility through a center of excellence with deep product understanding and expertise that works closely with both the technology teams and the business. Crop also touches on some of the emerging technology American Express is using such as machine learning and AI.

Dean Leffingwell is just a "geek on a mission". Recognized as the one of the world’s foremost authorities on Lean-Agile best practices, his passion has always been improving the craft of software development.

With the release of SAFe 4.6, he hopes to do just that. Leffingwell shares some of the most important updates to the framework including how to address the challenge of moving from a traditional to a Lean|Agile mindset, more guidance on XP, TDD and BDD, and how to scale a scaling framework—think 1000+ PI Planning participants.

Allison Pollard and Noreen Emanuel sat down for a chat with us about their mentor-mentee relationship. As an external Agile coach Pollard was able to act as a “super coach,” and through this symbiotic relationship Emanuel has now become a coach herself at her place of work.

Pollard sees the relationship as a partnership: “For me it’s like I have a new colleague. I have a new person that has different ideas, their brain works differently, and they have all these great skills, so how do we tap into that together?” Hear concrete examples of how these two found common ground and recommendations for how coaches themselves can hone their skills.

Esther Derby has spent the last twenty-five years helping companies design their environment, culture, and human dynamics for optimum success. She sat down with us to talk about an alternative to top down control: clarity, conditions, and constraints.

Her approach is a response to organizations saying that they want their teams to step into responsibility and to be empowered, but yet the management structure gets in the way of that. She doesn’t advocate just throwing away all the direction, but that we’re going to make a direction by making a compelling goal and attractor, rather than by telling individuals what to do on a day to day basis.

"You give smart people a problem to solve and some constraints so they don’t have to figure out on every single day whether they should use this tool or that tool, and they’ll come up with some really great solutions."

Head of R&D and Work Futurist at Atlassian, Dom Price sees an unsettling trend: a celebration of Agile teams who do all the right things but don’t get any of the value. While Price sees Agile as “a philosophy, a spirit,” he argues that too many large organizations use it as a means to achieve compliance, managers going around with their checklists, saying “We do x, we do y, therefore we’re Agile tech.”

But Agile is a means to real value - faster time to market, more innovative teams, more engaged teams, which are the true signposts for business agility. Price shares his experiences helping Atlassian with their scaling transformation and a challenge for agilists: “It’s ironic for me that people who are Agile practitioners, ones who are saying Agile is all about evolution, aren’t evolving as people. They’re static. They’re using things they learned 17 years ago and they’re deploying it in the exact same way.”

A very familiar voice for the Agile Amped podcast listeners is our special guest for this episode. Howard Sublett, the Director of Community Development at Accenture | SolutionsIQ is moving on to become the Chief Product Owner for the Scrum Alliance.

Hear about Sublett’s journey in the Agile industry and learn how he helped build the culture we all here at SolutionsIQ cherish. Sublett offers examples of the kinds of activities and tools we’ve implemented to keep our community engaged.

Troy Magennis is a consultant to major companies on Agile implementation and portfolio planning, and a seasoned conference speaker. He was a keynote speaker at Agile2018 on the topic of data, which for the first time was approved as a track by the Agile Alliance this year.

Magennis says part of being a good Agile coach is understanding data, although data can be inconvenient because it doesn’t always show what we want it to show. He walks us through the metrics that you really need to capture and why.

“If it doesn’t help you with a decision, or it doesn’t help you observe that something’s going off the rails earlier, it’s a vanity metric.”

Jim Benson is the author of the global bestseller "Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life" and self-identified "Agile heretic." A strong proponent for the values and principles, collaboration, and teamwork, Benson nonetheless is vocal on social media about ways Agile can approve. An example is when Agile teams don't do any documentation, pointing at the Agile Manifesto: "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools."

Benson contends that people mistakenly turn this into a false dichotomy where the former is good and the latter is bad. But, he says, "You can't have interactions between individuals without process, and our process is facilitated by tools... The process is our social contract about how we are going to interact." He agrees that the Manifesto is good but it was written by "a bunch of guys going skiing" and a few relatively minor tweaks could make it more impactful.

San Diego based April Wensel is the founder of Compassionate Coding. After a decade in software, she noticed that there was a lot of suffering in the industry. Rather than just assuming that that can't be changed, Wensel decided compassion was the answer. In this podcast, Wensel shares her experiences helping businesses to be more compassionate in not just business matters but also in their own interpersonal conduct. She also gives a useful definition of what compassion is (recognizing suffering and acting to end it) and is not (pity, or just faking niceness). And because all businesses are made up of people, anyone can get started being more compassionate. Individuals can get in touch with their core values and businesses can take a cultural retrospective.

Krys Blackwood is a Senior Lead UX Designer at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. With her design team, she is creating a cultural change in an 80-year-old organization that's used to shipping things in a very waterfall way, "which makes sense when you're working with a billion dollar space craft."

Blackwood has even gone so far as to travel to places like Spain and Australia to physically sit and work with the engineers who control space craft far out in space, to get a better understanding of their UX. "We are inserting a user-centered approach into robotic exploration of the solar system," she says.

In her presentation at Agile2018, she shares case studies of work ranging from using AR/VR to drive rovers on Mars to making operations of the upcoming Europa Clipper mission simpler, faster and more pleasant for the human beings who have to do them.

Jason Little is an international speaker, Agile management consultant, and the author of Lean Change Management. He spoke with us about approaching organizational change based on Agile principles; how to sense and respond to change rather than to think of “transformation” as a linear path with an end date; and how to think outside the prescriptive box of frameworks.

"Today we have everything from Agile digital strategy development to Agile marketing to Agile testing ...and it's completely missing the point. We're not trying to make each individual function more Agile, we're trying to get rid of the individual functions and focus on the whole organization."

Nowadays you can’t go anywhere without hearing about or interacting with voice recognition technology. Kari Ostevik of the Toronto-based Tribal Scale knows: she helped with the voice technology powering both Amazon Echo (i.e., “Alexa”) and Google Home. She provides 5 lessons for working in emerging technology:

Humility – nobody knows yet so everybody needs to be curious and patient.

Power of the Pair – Pair programming makes knowledge dissemination fast and seamless.

Ruthless Prioritization – Tech is changing all the time, so you have to be clear about priorities.

Test Late – In additional to testing early, with emerging tech, it’s important to have enough of a product to get good feedback.

One year ago, Accenture acquired SolutionsIQ, the leading pure-play Agile consultancy in North America. We invited two key players from each side of the acquisition – SolutionsIQ’s CEO John Rudd and Accenture Technology’s practice lead Jeff Emerson – to give a rare behind-the-scenes peek into the process of an acquisition while using Agile practices and embodying an Agile mindset and culture.

"How does a little company that is based on Agile values move into a very large organization, in a way that doesn’t destroy the little company and the same time allows the acquiring company to get the value and the promises out of that acquisition?… And yet that’s exactly what happened." – John Rudd

"We didn’t make an acquisition to have SolutionsIQ come and do more of what Accenture does. We did it to bring that special sauce, that special consulting and transformation expertise that SolutionsIQ has led in the market with. We want to help get that with our clients and with ourselves." – Jeff Emerson

Alicia McLain is an Organizational Transformation | Executive Coach with a keen eye for organizational systems. Her session at Keep Austin Agile 2018, called “Confidence vs. Ego – The Role Empathy Plays in Organizational Transformation,” highlights the differences between acting “in confidence” and acting “in ego.”

Confidence is about responding rather than reacting, being outward-focused and being comfortable in your own skin, whereas ego tends to be self-focused, self-centered. McLain pairs a Confidence-Ego Map with the Empathy Map to help people understand where others are coming from, why they behave the way they do, and what motivates that behavior. This is especially important today as emotional intelligence (EQ) is seen as perhaps even more valuable in organizational transformation than IQ.

Pete Behrens is a Leadership Agility Coach, Certified Enterprise Coach, and a CST. He sat down with us to shed light on the Certified Agile Leadership Program by the Scrum Alliance which, according to Behrens, was the number one requested education that wasn’t being provided by the community.“The purpose of this program is not to make leaders experts at Scrum, but to help them adapt an Agile mindset. Being a Certified Agile Leader is not the point coming out of a two-day class, but to introduce them to a mindset they should be aware of.”

Mindset is the gray matter between why we do our work and how we get it done. Gil Broza, a much sought-after speaker, Agile coach, and author of The Human Side of Agile and The Agile Mind-Set, sat down with us for a deep dive into the Agile mindset.

According to Broza, the Agile mindset is made up for 3 things:• Values: What we care about.• Beliefs: What we assume or hold to be true.• Principles: The standards that guide how we act.

Agile Amped producer Hanna Gnann attended the Women in Agile Lunch & Learn at Keep Austin Agile 2018, where the topic was sustainable pace. She was impacted by the speaker Tamara Nation, so we invited her to chat with us about sustainability, how to measure it and ultimately how to achieve it. Nation shares her tips, with Gnann providing color commentary, including:

- Balance and boundaries - making intentional choices about what thing you do not do. (Nation has stopped looking at her phone first thing in the morning)- Connect with nature daily - simple as stepping outside and breathing deep- Stop and eat - actually making meals a time to care for yourself and build rapport with colleagues- Take stock of your feelings - track how you are feeling in intense moments; meditation and prayer can help bring you back to center- Take time off - 50% of Americans don't use their allotted vacation, so this can be as simple as actually using your vacation or taking the weekend to do nothing

First off, Mark Waite is a test-driven development (TDD) proponent. But - and hear him out - TDD may not actually be needed every single time you write code. Waite shares his discovery that the developers of Git - the leading version control system today - didn't use any tests during the first year or so of development. But why? Waite argues that testing is a quality assurance measure - and sometimes you don't care about things like longevity, breaking the code, or even shoddy value. For example, "Sometimes I need a tool to do something once" and never again. He goes on to point out that TDD is most useful when there is significant risk, or you need to understand the code better, or when there is a benefit to intentional variation.

Are educators doing all they can to prepare students for the real world? High school teacher and CSM Bret Thayer feels we could be doing better to give today's students - digital natives - the soft skills that modern businesses need. These include critical thinking, problem-solving, creativity, innovation, collaboration, adaptability. Thayer is all too familiar with the struggle of getting smartphone-obsessed teenagers to acknowledge, let alone learn from, other people - teachers as well as other adults and peers. He uses Scrum and Agile technicals and mindsets to get students involved in their own education.

Drawing from the work of Lisa Lahey and Robert Kegan, Henry Dittmer shares his experience using the Immunity to Change (ITC) map to help participants of his session identify what is keeping them from achieving a desired change. Dittmer used the four-step ITC map to demonstrate why - paradoxically - he doesn't like presenting at conferences. The four steps are:

1. What One Big Thing do you want to commit to changing?

2. What are you doing or not doing that's keeping you from doing this thing?

3. What worries and fears (hidden competing commitments) arise when you think about doing this thing?

4. What assumptions make these commitments real for you?

From here you can test assumptions: are they real, are they silly? Do you really believe them? Dittmer finds that some difficult assumptions can open the door to coaching, for individuals and teams and even organizations. "It's really most powerful when individual leaders are getting leadership coaching," and then after they arrive at their One Big Thing, the team can look at itself collectively and decide what is their One Big Thing, specifically in terms of the company they are leading.

Diana Larsen is the Chief Relationship Builder at the Agile Fluency Project and she has a simple compelling message: software development is learning work. Knowledge work is what everyone is talking about - but Larsen argues that learning is really what we need to be doing today. She talks about "heroic learners" - people who have the courage, compassion and confidence to learn everywhere and all the time, because as Larsen puts it, "We have to get good and learning - or we get left behind." And this goes beyond just individuals - she discusses how teams need to learn together.

Dave Prior is a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) with Leading Agile, a Project Management Professional (PMP), and a podcast host. He got his start in project management at digital agencies. The problem he saw with the agencies was that they were willing to bend over backwards for the client, which made it difficult to stay profitable. The key to making digital agencies Agile, according to Prior, is to “get everyone trained together, make sure sales is part of that, figure out how to rewrite your statements of work, figure out how your company is going to bear the cost of teaching your client [Agile].”

Prior also addresses the question: Should I still get a PMP, does it have any value?

Where will the Agile space be in ten years? This great question kicks off this edition of Round Table Roulette with our guests Aidee Fischer, Corey Post and Steve Kovach, three experienced Agile coaches here at SolutionsIQ. On the topic of the future of Agile, our guests are unanimous: "Agile will be everywhere."

Can Agile work at any scale? If no, at what size does it break down? (Fischer: "Depends on what we mean by Agile. If we're talking about the idea of delivery value quickly to customers, being more customer-centric... making our people or products the best that they can be, then I think that, yes: it could work at any scale.")

What do you tell managers that want to compare Agile teams to each other?

Is there a "Dunbar Number" for Agile?

How do you know if someone is a good or great Agile coach?

Share a story about Agile outside of software. (Kovach was moved last year by a session he attended at Mile High Agile by the teenaged Aaron Vadakkana who has been using Scrum at home for years. Listen here: Agileamped – Using-scrum-at-home-with-aaron-vadakkan)

If you could only give one piece of advice to a new ScrumMaster, what would it be?

Neil Smith and Chuck Copello from Red Hat sat down with us to discuss how an Agile mindset can overcome the 6th principle of the Agile Manifesto:

“The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.”

Red Hat is a large open source software company with 11,000 employees globally, 2,000 of whom work from home. Both Chuck and Neil have team members across different continents, and they provide practical advice for how to be a distributed Agile team and still feel united. They even shared with us tips for helping distributed teams collaborate more effectively.

When Agile coaches Nidhi Sharma and Michael Callahan are looking at changing someone’s mindset and changing the way that they behave and work, they want to start with a purpose. The pair tied it all together in their Four R’s model for transitioning to Lean thinking:

- Why are we doing this work? (Right Reasons)- What work would fit that purpose? (Right Work)- Who needs to be in the room to have those conversations? (Right People)- What is the last responsible moment for doing the work? (Right Time)

Agile coach Ashok Mohan and IT Product Owner Burkhard Lustig sit down with Agile Amped to share their stories working at Ableton, a business focused on making software and hardware for music makers. In particular, the duo discuss an pivotal learning experience with a difficult trade-in program. Although Product teams had already been leveraging Agile development and practices for 10 years, this was not the case for the Business. When the trade-in program revealed gaps in organizational capability, they decided to make changes, specifically taking four major steps:

1. They introduced team planning.2. To make work visible, they organized "expos" - demos more suited to their laid-back culture.3. Because WIP was too high and not enough was getting to done, middle management was brought together to own the work and the process, with coaching from Ashok and Brendan (another Ableton coach).4. After too much WIP, the second top impediment was lack of alignment, so they focused on establishing a shared purpose.

Mohan echoed Marsha Shenk's sentiment (in this podcast - Agileamped – Limitations-opportunities-of-neurophysiology) that "as humans, every one of us wants to contribute... They don't know how to contribute in a system... [but] it's almost always about 'how can you get to people to contribute in a way that's meaningful for them?'"

Marsha Shenk, coach, consultant and founder of The BestWork People, takes us on a whirlwind tour of how the brain affects everyday interactions. Shenk believes that people fundamentally want to contribute - to be part of meaningful interactions, which is what life - including business - is made up of.

Our favorite quote: "Business agility is not for the faint hearted."

More nuggets of wisdom Shenk offers:- "People get dumbed down by having imperatives imposed on them."- "Fear shuts down the prefrontal cortex, which is where our executive function is... so nothing new happens"- "Business is a social activity. Some people now think that itʻs happening between computers - no. Thereʻs somebody out there making a decision and that person has a beating heart."- "I recommend respecting the limitations of technology and ... physiology."- "In order to keep learning after puberty, you have to develop the skill of building new neural pathways."

Lars Bruns and Sudhir Nelvagal started working together in GE Healthcare 13 years ago. In this episode, they share their experience helping GE with their Agile transformation. GE, being a long-standing business giant with its fingerprints in virtually every infrastructure domain and every industry, is still traditional in many ways, but it is transforming itself to become a lean startup. Bruns and Nelvagal share their experiences applying innovative Agile and Lean techniques across GE’s traditional hardware and physical engineering-oriented business units. Other topics touched on include failing fast and leadership buy-in.

Natalie Warnert is an independent consultant and the founder of Women in Agile, which started five years ago and has spread far and wide. Since then, Warnert has written her theses about why women are less involved in the Agile community. In her research, she has uncovered interesting biases that men and women have about themselves and each other. She briefly touches on current social movements that show how views on equality, inclusivity and diversity are converging. She's also excited about the grassroots pop-up chapters of Women in Agile that people are starting: "It's been so great to see people taking initiative to do these things... I can't do it alone and I don't want to." Other topics include globalization, UX, and AI.

“Everybody knows going into the budget process that people make up the numbers because they know they’re going to get cut, they’re going to get manipulated, they’re negotiating for their bonuses, so it’s already a bad document to begin with,” says Nevine White. White and Mike De Luca from Beyond Budgeting Round Table of North America sat down with us for a deep dive into Beyond Budgeting, including a definition of what it is and some history. They also walk us through two real-world examples of implementing it.

De Luca says Beyond Budgeting requires a different philosophy around leadership: it needs to be very decentralized and is intended to drive decision making to the lowest appropriate level. He points out that the process of implementing Beyond Budgeting doesn’t really end since learning organizations must continue to refine and adapt. However, a lot of the heavy lifting can take anywhere from 6-18 months. Listen to find out what that entails, how to get started, how to measure and successfully transform financial planning in your organization.

Angela Wick is the founder of BA-Squared and in this episode she talks about how business analysis is shifting drastically and how leaders are championing the charge. Wick discusses how important it is for business analysts to collaborate with Product Owners to focus on building the right products: "Agile can't happen without analysis... If you're building the wrong thing, it doesn't matter how fast you are." But what is really exciting to Wick is how much the world and her field is changing as a result of AI and machine learning. What might take a BA weeks to produce, an algorithms today can do at a fraction of the cost and time. But the complexity in the world means that you have to pair vision with rapid experiments - and a dash of curiosity - to make sure your business is on the right path.

Joshua Seckel is an Agile coach and also Sevatec’s Chief Solution Architect for Agile and DevOps. Joshua drives the the adoption of business, technical, and management agility both internally and at client sites. His presentation at Business Agility Conference 2018 is called "Agile Contracting in the Federal Government" and in this podcast he shares his experience helping USCIS not only contract Agile teams but also to evolve the procurement process to be more Agile. With a focus on enabling experimentation and cross-department collaboration, Seckel helped stand up 20 Agile development teams who are able today to deliver to production 4-5 times a week - in a federal environment!

Some recommendations that Seckel wants to share are:1. Many changes are risk-driven, which is directly related to the corporate culture. By adapting the business to allow a little more risk, you can unlock a lot more learning and success.2. Learn fast. Succeed either in learning (e.g., from failure) or in execution.3. Meet people where they are.

Hosted by Leslie Morse in New York City at the Business Agility 2018 conference.

Allison Flaten is an HR practitioner (and one of our favorite people) with over a decade of experience in working with and leading HR departments in variety of industries, five of which she has spent in an Agile organization. She walks us through the differences between traditional HR departments where the focus tends to be on risk mitigation, compliance, and policy-driven communication, and Agile HR that focuses on how to make the organization the best place for its employees.

Flaten’s advice includes: - Ensure HR can adapt and shift with the needs of the business, as well as with the employees. - Share your HR backlog - Get feedback from employees and leadership to get buy-in before releasing policies - Provide fast performance feedback which can result in immediate adjustment, rather than waiting for an annual performance review

Why should a job interview for a role on an Agile team follow the traditional interview format with high anxiety and low level of psychological safety? How do you find people who are natural collaborators? Jason Tice, VP of business innovation at Worldwide Technology, spoke with Agile Amped about using collaborative activities, or games, during job interviews to gather feedback and assess necessary skills. Tice says creating a safe space where candidates are willing to be vulnerable is a game changer for finding the right candidates for high-performing teams.

Hosted by Howard Sublett.

This episode of Agile Amped is part of a series in partnership with the Business Agility Institute. Register for the Business Agility Conference in New York March 14-15, 2018 and use code solutionsiq-founding-member to save 25% off registration: businessagilityconf.com/